Void is one I’ve often thought I’d like to try if I had time to dig into it.
this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2024
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Hey, I used Void and had a great time with it, I loved the speed of xbps and acter I got used to it, the minimal nature of runit felt lile a breath of fresh air (which feels weird in retrospect, as I've never had any issues with systemd). The only problem I had (other than getting used to xbps and runit) was pipewire. As I was using a tiling WM, I couldn't figure out what was happening and why, but I was having serious issues with pipewire and wireplumber not working, until through trial and error I finally managed to fix it but by then I was already set on moving to Fedora (again). That was in April btw.
TLDR: I'd recommend it. XBPS and Runit are new (and pretty good) and take a bit to get used to, but the thing that drove me away was pipewire issues.
Does runit have the equivalent of systemctl --user for managing per-user daemons like pipewire? I had some issues with pipewire recently and being able to journalctl --user -u pipewire and systemctl --user restart pipewire was a total godsend for me.
Gentoo has binary packages now, you might want to try it again. There are retroarch packages in the overlays. Otherwise, interesting distros I know of that you haven't listed yet are
- Void
- Guix System
- Gobo Linux (unfortunately very low on maintainers so probably not usable as a daily driver, but it is to me the most interesting of these)
That defeats the whole purpose of using gentoo tho.
you’ve mentioned this twice in the comments & now i’m curious! do you kind elaborating a bit more? i’m still getting a handle on all the diff distros & functionalities.
Gentoo is a distro that you compile all the packages ( atleast used to be that ) where you compile packages with flags that optimize those for your exact cpu.
Also allows you to strip out features from packages while compiling like X11/wayland uf you don't use either.
This can help a lot in general performance of your system.
You can use binary packages for x86_64-v3 and it will already use a lot more modern CPU instructions, and it will still compile single packages from source if you change the USE flags to something the binhost doesn't have.
It certainly doesn't "defeat the whole purpose of using Gentoo".
I used to strip out more than half the features those packages provided that I didn't need, so it does for my usecases.
What percentage of packages?
100%, I use to do global use flags at '-*' and then set minimal amount of flags till I get something working.
Spent a whole day doing that.
And how much time did you save from the performance gains?
Wouldn't know, because at the time I was by my pc maybe 30 mins a day because of my job, so I just let my system compile in my 13 hours work time so just never tested that stuff out.
I do know that it felt snappy always.
“100%” which would include those that either don’t have any use flags or all of them disabled by default/masked where -* wouldn’t do anything. pkgconf for example. Uh huh, yeah right.
For a Linux distro, try Slackware or one of the immutable ones. For not a Linux distro, try one of the BSDs.
Try PikaOS.
It's Debian for gaming. They use the CachyOS kernel (rebranded), BTRFS, the Debian Sid base, and they do the package optimization thing that Cachy does. They also use a lot of the same UI tooling from Nobara, like the welcome screen and icons, and the update GUI is based on but an improvement over the one from Nobara. There's also the same Kernel Manager and Scheduler selector as what you'd find in Cachy.
Like Arch, it's a rolling update distro, and they have some kind of automated process that builds/optimizes new packages every day.
It's admirable what they're trying to do, and I'm currently considering making a bare-metal switch.
PikaOS looks cool, never heard of it, but it had me a Debian optimized hardware and software support:). What's the hyprland version?
Not sure, but it's supposed to be near-bleeding edge for everything. I couldn't get the Hyprland version to boot in a VM, so I can't be sure
Sadly, it's for Haswell and higher, I'm on an older Sandy Lake CPU so could not get it to boot and then I saw in their Wiki about the requirements. Yeah, it's an old PC. (~14 yrs old and as temperamental as a teenager!) :)
Bummer! It's kinda neat to use, but yeah, they dropped older hardware support (though it's still fairly young, so maybe it will be a thing in the future).
I'd suggest OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and one of the UBlue images - maybe Bazzite, since you mentioned gaming. But Steam and GOG run on all of those.
Here's a cool idea: uBlue and specifically Bazzite. And should it not be entirely to your liking, you can always build a custom ublue image!
Nix is great, I went from arch to nix and never went back. All the customization, none of the risk. You break your rig you roll back to its previous state
Agree, might go back to it, but when that came up at the beggining of this year ( or was it last ? ) about mainter's made me leave it until the situation settled down cause I didn't wanna use a distro in an unstable maintenanve state.
Fortunately it was just the Nixos foundation that was having issues. The Nixpkg repo and nix package manager were stable
Bluefin will help you learn how to use an immutable distro
Current nixos user and it seems to me to have stabilized a good bit. I know that the nixos foundation held their first elections for the steering community. Also they recently released their new stable 24.11 version that seemed to go smoothly.
It is not back to where it was in terms of dev trust but there is good progress, and my software still gets updated so I have stuck with it
Try Bedrock Linux and tell us all about it.
I've tried it and while it's a cool concept, I didn't have a need for it, and the system felt more unstable (even though I don't think it really was).
I went through a similar path to yours, and settled on Bazzite. If gaming is not your main thing, you might want to check out the ublue project to learn about the other spins
I'm pretty new to Linux, so not sure if this is the best option. But I've been playing around with the Fedora KDE spin now that it's an official version. Really been enjoying it so far! Much prefer KDE to GNOME.
I have been using Linux for a long time (20+ years) and my main had been Arch.
Just wanted to say I put Fedora KDE spin on a laptop about 8 months ago and it has been great! Updates are frequent but have gone smoothly, some software is newer than arch which is kind of surprising.
But it's all been integrated well and I was pleasantly surprised.
So I agree with you as a longer Linux user.
I hope the new Fedora project lead does just as good a job.
If you're looking for a challenge you could try FreeBSD. While not Linux it's still unix like and can provide a great learning experience. I believe they have retroarch in their packages, and I've seen videos of people getting Steam working. They provide excellent documentation on their OS as a whole.
Curious, why the constant switching? You haven't addressed what you're specifically looking for or how many of the other distros failed to meet your needs. Or is it just for fun and to try new things (a perfectly valid reason)?
For gaming you want something with recent kernel and packages as the space is evolving rapidly. I'd say check out Silverblue or Bazzite as they seem interesting well maintained projects on a solid foundation. But I may be biased, as a happy fedora user. I'd avoid anything too niche but that's just me.
I wrote at the end in an edit it's for fun and learning new things.
I tend to get bored of running the ssme distro for more than a year.
Luckilly my machine isn't a work machine and just my personal plaything which I can break whenever I wan't and then spend time learning how to fix it ( exceot lfs. i still need to use it to manage my server's )
Void linux might be something, if you want to try a distro that is independent from the usual distro-tree-roots.
I don't know if it is available yet, but KDE Linux sounds pretty cool. It's kinda the same "Arch for everyone" take on Arch that Valve has going on with SteamOS, but with some pretty fancy stuff planned.
If you want to learn about a couple of cool customisations, you could also take a look at Garuda Linux, specifically the Dragonized Gaming Edition (aka Bloaty McBloatface Edition) or XeroLinux (although I don't know if that's maintained atm, I think the dev had to flew from a war in the middle east)
looking at you qt-webengine and firefox
You do know gentoo has binary versions of the bigger packages, like LibreOffice and browsers like Firefox, right? Right?
Try Slackware.
That defeats the purpose of using gentoo tho.
True... i compile mine as well.
Bodhi Linux or ElementaryOS
Chimera Linux
Puppy is pretty neat.
Cachyos It's amazing it's arch on steroids (you may also turn a regular arch install into cachyos if you wish)
Try YiffOS